AIS B pains in med france, jfm

[tcm]

Perhaps due to some internal politcking or heightened security summink, the french med signal stations have to decided to maintain nice lists of loads of boat and ship movements. This essenetially takes the form of calling up on ch16 every boat they can see on their screen, and asking howe many pasengers, next port , previous port and so on. Thus if you have AIS B - you get a call. First time it's quite fun cos heh, you get light queries just the same as the ferries. Afte3r a while it's a pain, and of course loads and loads of boats get queried such that ch16 is at leats 50percent fll of this sort of query. You can expect to get queried as you move from one signal staion area to another, and if you turn down ch16 cos of the racket well, a helicopter might buzz you vert close to somehow check if you look like a smuggler. Waving to them happily seems to make them go away happy.

So, after a whie you decide to turn off your AIS B transponder. Cept then you may (or may not) have any AIS info. Usually but not always it seems, the AIS B unit has a "silence" function which stops the transmit but keeps the receive - so that unit needs to be accessible. OR i suppose you could have the same barmy setup as i hav with AIS C unit feeding the plotter, and compeletely sepret AIS B unit to computer with big on/off switch - thus making yerself invisible to the ch16 nagging.

 

[fireball]

Blimey - I'm surprised we didn't get the big brother attitude over here first ... but then we do keep the CG busy with Radio Checks instead - perhaps you lot should give that a go?!

 

[jhr]

Gordon Bennett! You spend a fortune to make sure people can pinpoint your position in mid-Atlantic, and now you're complaining that everyone knows where you are.

There's just no pleasing some people

 

[jfm]

Yup tcm, that was happening all last summer. Ch16 was full of "This is cap ferrat signal station calling yacht X", in English with Fr accent. She does have quite a sexy voice, but it still gets tiresome after a while. So yes, while having lunch or a rest you turn the volume down, as a result of which anyone who really does have a mayday has 90% fewer people to hear it, doh

They only make the initial call on 16, then sw to 72. They did the cruise sip next to me in Villefranche and I sw to 72 and it was entertianing hearing the number of crew and passengers onboard. It sounded like a country

Anyway, for this specific reason I got an AIS with a "transmit off" switch. The Comar does this and the Garmin AIS600. Both have bare-ended wires for this function so you can wire to a switch on the dash that matches all your other switches

Cap d'Antibes station does it much less than Cap Ferrat for some reason. Were you getting it back at Bandol and Marseille etc?

Sorry can't be there tonight for fwx. Hope to catch up this weekend though. I'm there sat till monday night. U around?

 

[Hurricane]

Praps someone should tell them that we have a system called DSC!!!
Both Class A and B transmit the MMSI - it isnt rocket science to then call the vessel they want using DSC.

We only got called once by the Spanish and they used DSC so it shows that it CAN be done.

The only other time we've been challenged was a NATO Operation working in the same waters and they simply called on 16 but I suspect that they were only confirming that we were who the AIS was saying we were.